He shakes his bones around
And wears them overhead like flags
By night he stalks through shipping yards,
Amusement parks by day,
In time with all the parts he's stolen,
He will build a mausoleum
Seal himself inside just to
Emerge when moonlight fades from view
And night is darker than blindness

He stumbles in an out
His brains are full of fire
He tastes the morning sun
And falls aghast with pleasure.
He stands and brushes off
The filth and turbulence.
He barks into a mask
His sweat sustains him
He presses pennies through
Your skin and seals them
Inside their package there
Where you can feel them

He laughs indifferently
He cries with pleasure
Ignites the tablecloth
And folds it twice
He slips ideas into
The money boxes
He hears the rain upstairs:
What? What's that? That's a fat cat! That's a fine hat hat hat hat hat...

He calls his mystery
Out through the sunlight
The birds don't ask him why,
But spread the message
He stings on either side
Whoever watches
He wets his hands and sets his watch
He waits with pleasure

He gathers firewood
In stacks that tower
And when they tumble down
He loses power
The skies break down their door,
Ask him to wonder
Does he belong up there?
He knows the answer.

The skies defend themselves
They rain and thunder
They pelt him down with flames
And tear asunder
A hundred artifacts
Beneath his bootsteps
He grasps at them in fear
And dives on after
Into the tunnel here
Where others like him stay
Paved into the ceiling
He hears the clattering
On down the way
He chases after echoes
Trips over shadows
He loses himself

He loses himself with pleasure

He comments on himself
So no one else can
He's overweight and he
Could use a sun tan
He waits for you to leave
Before he'll follow
He feels inside his skull
And thinks it's hollow

He hears his name and he
Takes flight at noon so he
Can make it back again
Before the moon

He single-handedly
Gives up our secrets
To any spy who'll pay
A healthy ransom

He's spoken innocence and
He's spoken nonsense
He comes to me each night
Proposing new games
I've never played before
And always feared
He cannot calmly state but scream
His shopping list

He tries to change his name
He's on top of his life
Cos he's the only one
The only one who lives it
Nobody will do it for him
Nobody will do it for him

My mind is defined by the lines on the page
My face shows no sign of my age
But the faint hairs that grow on my lip and my chin
Show that I'm still not a man
Your lips hold more secrets than I'll ever know
And both of us still need to grow
To be weightless in space and soaring through time
Would be nothing like holding your hand

Tonight while I'm with you my mind's on the brink
My head is exploding and I barely think
And I'm taking your kindness, not giving you mine
Just fanning the flames on the fire
I'll never be great and I'll never be yours
I'm forcing you open, you're locking the doors
If I told you that I didn't want you to know
Then I would be naught but a liar

I sing your name from the tops of the trees
Disturbing the sleep of the birds and the bees
While the shadows creep silently on with the moon
Which rises and falls with my tune

Other men that you know are more pleasing to you
But no other man feels like I do
You can search through the jungle of concrete and grass
Parked cars and bicycles, dark curtained glass
And you'll see all the people and they're just like me
Finding some reason to be
We keep all our reasons in bullets and lines
No way that I could express mine
As dawn starts to break, your toes drenched in the dew
It becomes clear that my reason is you.

I cough and take a furtive drag
And walk suspended magnetically
Through an alley full of cobwebs and decaying flesh
Leftovers is what it is
And I rip myself off
A piece of the wallpaper to roll a joint, while
Mechanical spiders traipse their plastic webbing
Replenishing the sticky paste
Cheaper to produce, but far from long-lasting
And
In the mirror my reflection holds a fortune cookie
Cracks it open
Reads aloud
And hundreds all around him hear him and applaud
But mirrors have no speakers
And all I hear’s the mechanical whir
The spiders’ servos stepping, sliding, spinning threads
Of nylon
In service of some sickly, sapient sadist
Who’s been slurping down the fluids in my brain
Nightly
And just like me—
To **** a man and throw the body in someone else’s garbage disposal

The smoke rings rise and float away
‘Til Someone sees them undulating
And I, in secret, *******
Into an old bible which I’ve renovated
Now it’s livable
A real great place to raise your kids up, as they say
I’ve added levels
Torn down all the walls
The living room’s the dining room’s the bedroom
As it were.
And I have to shove it ‘tween the dumpster and a rat
Who’ll never talk because he’s one of me
Though unlike me…
Forced out by higher powers than himself
At least…
Assumed powers.
Though as we know, dominion over Earth’s a fool’s game
That real estate investment you made’ll
Swallow you up before
Somebody else could lay more…
Justifiable claim.
I say this to be a comfort.
Though there may be none left for you.

And Someone follows blindly
Watching smoke rings through black sockets
Clawing his way toward
Clawing at my wallpaper.
My spiders run and hide in fear, their tails between their eight robotic legs
Thirty-two red eyes glow through the shadows
Quake with fear
Someone trips and stumbles through
With nylon clasping at his body
Never taking hold
He snaps the lines before the paste can even get a chance to stick
And I on high
Up fire escape, watch down with
Sudden fear for realization of the present
And Someone toddles away
No lasting damage done
I leave it ‘til tomorrow to recover
And shred my secrets into pieces large enough to read
And scatter them into the night.

Left to remain
Anything to quell fear
Seized opportunity
Sold soul to fear
Parallel vision
Past and present collide
Time recalled of time without fear
Haunting specter
Wild cry
Wild sound of devotion
Old quest uncovered from the dust
Old wilderness restoring to old glory

Firing from old expended
Reservoirs transferring water
Into coffee grinders, to dust
Chained in a crab *** at the bottom of the sea
Pelted with repeated blasts of particles of light
Until the matter is compressed into a singularity
Or breaches on the matter anyway besides
Unleashing rather than a sinkhole trap,
A flash flood over everything
Coating vision with a venereal sheen
Inundated in a fluid silk connective fabric bond
Until the matter reaches
Into pockets of relief
And miracles of situational
Restorative advance
Particulate regenerative
Relationship encounters
Debris from space accumulating
Hoping in some arcane sense
To be reformed together into beasts anew
While similarly fossils of
An ancient swarm of locusts
Are unearthed
They’re met with magnets
Positioned counter to the flow of electricity
This array is aligned to the magnetosphere
Of that old planet
Where I have lived before and left kinsmen behind to grow a colony of their own
But my own magnetism is calibrated today
To the wildly different magnetosphere of my latest home



To put it mildly, out of wild instinct, exiled from an old society
Of innocence/intelligence
A pretense over bell curve
Environment restrictive of
Fraternization *******

On a day too perfect for itself
The stage-play left upon my table
All the actors meandering about
Chance encounters replaying dramas.

The return—
Returning to a home
Folding time and space
To bring back the memory of the day of departure
Arms have extended and grasped all the while
Till today, they take hold of what they reached for
Its familiar contours
Its memory foam
It gives way easily
The meantime has been too kind to its impression
Unkind to its façade
The chaos theory proven true
In their minute variation

The fanfare plays, too often flat
The welcome feast is stale at that
Debriefing passes, inauspicious
The silent distance surreptitious
Replacements ready, set in place
Just one last chance to see the face
Of everything that’s left behind
That it might lay to rest in mind

The return.
This is no longer a home
Time can lose itself again.
Space is mercifully cold
Arms now folded at their sides
Never more
Return again.

……Now
With springing force
I was shot out into the future
And with needle to the suture
Sewed together what I could

Lo, the spring sprung back into
The autumn
Found my porthole at the bottom
Into all I understood

Yet,
An equal opposite reaction
Fueled combustibly by action
From believing things that I was told to read
Found
Me far beyond what I
had seen
Cross dystopian ravine
Though in spite of any betterment, still brought to you by greed

Now from safely at the station
In the cold and condensation
I can see with clearest vision
The successes of my mission
Here, within, the multitudinous expanse of tears and laughs
Will be difficult to honor with a proper epitaph

Overman—
Follow you the music of a generation
Premonitions of the culture
Constantly unseating one another
At the throne beneath your soapbox?
Quarrel you with Parrish Priests and
Local Lords and
Moneyed Many and
Other Overmen?

Overman—
Speak you in uncommon tongue
Through veils of bourgeois idols
Through clouded visions blinding you to pleas from those beneath
Through impenetrable barriers about your plywood castle?

Overman—
Reject you any god lain at your feet,
Any miracle as trivia,
Any sincerity as foolishness,
Any ethnic pride as blasphemy,
Papal Pagan figureheads as absurdity?

Overman—
Have you children born unnaturally,
Brothers cross the moonlit gulf,
Sisters of incestuous intimacy,
Fathers of musical prowess,
Mothers of a warm genetic lab?

Overman—
Your day is coming
One hundred million of you
In synchronistic harmony
Of uniform variety
Of classless social rigidity;
Becoming one with the orbital network,
A single entity to govern life among the planets,
An immortal computer god
Expanding past the reaches of
The spent and worn-out orb
That keeps revolving, spiraling downward,
Closer, closer to the sun—
Overman, will you outlive them all?
Overman, you were there first,
Will you be the first beyond?